The game is often broken but they’ve nailed the physics-ey feel so hard that it’s a defining feature of the game.
When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp.
Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and replayable. It feels like something whacky and new is around every corner. Playing on PS5 I’ve been blessed with hardly any game-breaking bugs or performance issues, but my PC friends have definitely been frustrated at times
All other games from the same studio have the same features.
In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.
It's actually a really nice spell casting system. It lets you have a ton of different spells with only 4 buttons. It rewards memorizing the most useful (like reinforce). It gives a way for things like the squid disruptor fields or whatever they're called to mess with your muscle memory while still allowing spells. It would be way less interesting if it was just using spell slots like so many other games.
The only wrong thing I've been throwing is the SOS Beacon instead of a Reinforce, which is just annoying, and not just once. It makes the game public if it was friends-only and gives it priority in the quick play queue. So that can't be it.
The dialing adds friction to tense situations, which is okay as a mechanic.
I think it has the best explosions in any game I've played too. They're so dang punchy. Combined with their atmospheric effects (fog and dust and whatnot) frantic firefights with bots look fantastic.
It's such a janky game. Definitely feels like it was built using the wrong tool for the job. Movement will get stuck on the most basic things. Climbing and moving over obstacles is always a yucky feeling.
I’ve almost moved on from online reviews. So many are fake, so many these days are slop. Half the time a 3.5 place is rated so low because people pick the most random ass reasons to slap it with 1 star.
Also I’ve decided I don’t want to live my life by following what Google says I should do as a default. Sometimes I go to a place that sucks. But that happened when I checked Google reviews anyway!!
I mostly ignore the ratings and spot-check some reviews with good and bad ratings. If the good reviews actually describe something concrete and the bad reviews are nonsense, I take both of those as a good sign. If the good reviews are vague and the bad reviews are actually justified, then the place is probably not so good.
Similar with online shopping. If all the one-star reviews are complaining about the shipment being lost in the mail or other irrelevant nonsense, the product is probably pretty good.
About the only reviews worth reading are 4-2 stars out of 5. 5s are overblown or fake. 1s quite often are about something dumb. A 3 for for example is apt to at least be thoughtful
Feel like you can also achieve pretty correct programs using good tests. Like really good tests.
I’m thinking of generative tests (quickcheck style), fuzzing, erroring on invariants, contract testing (see the test.contract clojure library for a very cool contract test setup!).
Really really good test suites can do stuff that even logically verified programs can’t do. They’re just a pain in the ass to write. Seems like a good use of LLMs, and you can keep using the same languages!
For me macros are a power user tool that are useful in libraries to seriously upgrade UX of your public functions. Kinda like how crazy complex typescript generics can seriously upgrade the UX of your lib.
It’s hard to explain without explaining a bunch of what a specific library does. But many clojure libraries expose macros that let you interact with them in much more readable/terse ways.
I’m on my phone but a good one to google is core.logic. It exposes a macro to define a “logic function”, which lets you define logical expressions using pattern matching. You can come up with rules that would be many more LOC and less readable as a normal function. You can of course define them as a normal function too, which is useful when the pattern matching doesn’t express the problem well!
I also understand this is an issue for a lot of people but it’s never been an issue for me! I wouldn’t want it for serverless stuff I guess. But I would never think to do that lol
If you’re in the market for fun hackable tool that sits between “bash script” and “real developer” I highly recommend checking out babashka.
It lets you write shell scripts with clojure. Babashka itself is a single executable, so no JVM bulk or startup time. And the built-in libs include all sorts of nifty utilities. Parsers, servers, excellent async stuff (but IMO clojure might have the best async story of any language out there so I’m biased), http stuff. All macro-able and REPL-able and everything. It’s a scripting dream, and when it’s time to be an adult, you can throw it on the JVM too!
a different approach is to replace bash altogether and switch to modern shells like fish, elvish, murex, nushell (not stable yet afaik) or oils (very interesting approach, it has a bash or sh compatible mode and another one with a more modern and cleaner syntax).
Looking into this more, it does indeed seem to be a cloudflare problem. It looks like cloudflare made a significant error in their bot fingerprinting, and Perplexity wasn't actually bypassing robots.txt.
To be honest I find cloudflare a much more scammy company than Perplexity. I had a DDoS attack a few years ago which originated from their network, and they had zero interest in it.
When I’m working from home and the internet goes down, I don’t care. My poor private-equity owned corporation, think of the lost productivity!!
But if I was trying to buy insulin at 11 pm before benefits expire, or translate something at a busy train station in a foreign country, or submit my take-home exam, I would be freeeaaaking out.
The cloudflare-supported internet does a whole lot of important, time-critical stuff.
When an orbital precision strike reflects off the hull of a factory strider and kills your friend, or eagle one splatters a gunship, or you get ragdolled for like 150m down a huge hill and then a devastator kills you with an impassionate stomp.
Those moments elevate the game and make it so memorable and replayable. It feels like something whacky and new is around every corner. Playing on PS5 I’ve been blessed with hardly any game-breaking bugs or performance issues, but my PC friends have definitely been frustrated at times
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